Child S Life

TRAGEDY AFFECTS children every day. However, rarely does it affect so many in one place at one time as it did in Littleton. Everyone has an answer about cause, but that is not the issue. The issue is finding a solution.Kids are angry, and they have a right to be. They face tremendous pressures often with no one to listen and guide them in the right direction. Criticism focusing on whom to blame for this is not effective. What is? Mentoring.Statistics prove that mentoring works and makes a positive difference in a child's life.

CHICAGO - Kaney O'Neill knows she has limits as a mother. The 31-year-old woman from Des Plaines, Ill., cannot walk, move her fingers independently or feel anything from the chest down. A decade ago, O'Neill was a Navy airman apprentice when she was knocked from a balcony during Hurricane Floyd, leaving her a quadriplegic. When she discovered she was pregnant last December, she felt fear and joy. She quickly embraced the opportunity to raise a child, feeling she had the money and family support to make up for her paralysis.

MY HEART was in my mouth as I read the Feb. 1 article ''Lesbian appeals child's custody to convicted murderer dad.''It truly is a sad state of affairs when the homophobia so rampant in this society leads a representative of our legal system to place a child's life and welfare into the hands of a murderer.Wake up, America - we are killing children instead of letting people who can care for them do so. Leigh Kennedy, LONGWOOD

Five words you will never hear from me again in life: I agree with James Dobson. Dr. Dobson is the founder of Focus on the Family, a conservative activist group, and ordinarily, I couldn't see eye to eye with him on the day of the week. But I agree with him about Mary Cheney. He wrote about the vice president's pregnant, lesbian daughter in a Time magazine essay in December. Here's part of what he said: "With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father.

TOYS ''R'' Us, Kay-Bee Toys and Bradlees are to be applauded for their decision to stop selling realistic toy firearms. The most common type of dramatic play with these types of toys involves both aggression and violence. A child's play is real to a child. Through play, a child learns to cope with the real world. Play is a child's ''work.''How tragic it had to take the death of two children to bring about this stance. Even more tragic was the president of the Toy Manufacturers of America asking: ''Would you put 40 people out of a job because one kid got killed?

''I don't know anything anymore,'' the anguished mother sobbed in an Atlanta courtroom. ''All I know is that I don't want my baby suffering anymore. I don't want to think I killed her. I don't want other people looking down on me as a murderer.''Get ready for a lot of wrenching heartbreak like this as the nation tries to reason, argue, weep, pray and legislate its way to a new consensus on what is known as the right to die. Death is no longer always inevitable. It can sometimes be postponed, even for years, by costly and complicated technology.

I READ with disgust, anger and something close to real terror a letter in Ann Landers column.An immigrant mother, new to this country, tells of sitting in a hospital waiting room with her dying 9-month-old child while her husband desperately telephoned the few people they knew in order to raise the $100 the hospital was demanding before they would admit the little boy.In the two hours it took for the money to arrive, the child died. And now there are so many questions inside of me screaming to be asked.

Our holiday tradition usually involves some reflection, however fleeting or painful, on those less fortunate than we, especially the world's needy children.Yet for most Americans the problem of world hunger remains a convenient abstraction, a frightening reality we prefer not to think about unless reminded by disturbing images in the media.What, after all, do we know of real hunger and deprivation, and how can we as individuals understand, much less remedy, this global problem?There is nothing like a concrete example to give a generalization life and credibility, as I always remind my writing students.

THE DEATH of Christa McAuliffe has especially grieved my family and me. I am a teacher and have chosen this career for 17 years because I always have believed that one good teacher could make a difference in a child's life. McAuliffe was an example of one of our best teachers. Thank you, Christa, for making the entire planet aware of teachers and their purpose on Earth. You taught the world to love a teacher once again.Mrs. Linda KiddMELBOURNE

Leave a child unattended in a car with a running motor and you could be fined up to $500 under a bill approved Wednesday by the Senate Transportation Committee. Designed largely to prevent kidnappings, the bill by Sen. Curt Kiser, R-Palm Harbor, also would make it illegal to leave a youngster alone in a parked car.If the Senate version or a similar House version become law, law enforcement officers could break into a car, rescue the child, turn him over to the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services and fine the driver.

ORANGE CITY -- For the second time in his young life, a 4-year-old boy named Christian is supposed to be taken from one family and placed with another. Denise and Ivar Baklid today expect to welcome Christian back to the Orange City home where he lived for 16 months before the state placed him with his maternal cousin and her husband in Tennessee. Some child psychologists and adoption specialists worry that the 4-year-old will be, at best, confused when he arrives in Orange City -- and at worst, emotionally damaged by a state policy that initially ripped him away from the Baklids and now finds him ripped away from another home after a court ruling.

The initial wire story that moved Tuesday night was just five paragraphs. Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus had performed CPR on a young boy who was unconscious after being pulled from a pool at a Disney World resort. "Rosenhaus brought him back,'' said Corporal Carlos Torres of the Orange County Sheriff's Office, thus confirming the story and, presumably, rubber-stamping its credibility. I happened to be in the Orlando office that night, and I admit it. The first thing that came to mind after reading about the super agent's life-saving heroics was a punch line.

I am writing about the article on the Project CHILD program at Partin Settlement Elementary ("Classroom Project Curtailed Amid Mixed Teacher Views," April 10). I have a child who attends this school, and we are very happy with the program, the school as a whole, and his teachers. Here are my questions and comments about the situation. Why aren't the statistical numbers produced for the success of the CHILD program at Partin Settlement the largest factor in making a decision about continuation of this program?

There are too many alligators. In fact, one is too many. I have learned of nothing they do that is useful. Why do we protect such dangerous and useless creatures? Isn't one child's life more valuable than all the alligators there are? They not only kill our children, but they also kill our pets and other domestic animals. In a recent letter to the editor, a reader stated that "they were here before we were." Rattlesnakes were here before we were, too, but would anyone in his right mind hesitate to kill one, whether it was threatening someone or not?

Do you have what it takes to change the world? If not the world, how about one child's life? The latter is not only within reach -- it's a phone call away. All it would take is an hour a week of your time. That's how long Lake/Sumter Take Stock in Children is asking you to devote as part of its mentor program. The program helps low-income children by providing them college scholarships, along with a mentor who meets with them once a week to talk about whatever is on their minds. The problem is that there are too few mentors to serve the 200 students selected for the program.

It doesn't take a special background or knowledge to be a guardian ad litem volunteer. They are everyday people from a variety of backgrounds, who share the desire to care for some of the most vulnerable children in our community. Each advocate is thoroughly trained and supported to be able to work effectively and with confidence. In Lake County, guardian ad litem volunteers were able to help 738 children during 2000. However, more than 480 children had to navigate the system without a volunteer.

The initial wire story that moved Tuesday night was just five paragraphs. Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus had performed CPR on a young boy who was unconscious after being pulled from a pool at a Disney World resort. "Rosenhaus brought him back,'' said Corporal Carlos Torres of the Orange County Sheriff's Office, thus confirming the story and, presumably, rubber-stamping its credibility. I happened to be in the Orlando office that night, and I admit it. The first thing that came to mind after reading about the super agent's life-saving heroics was a punch line.

There are too many alligators. In fact, one is too many. I have learned of nothing they do that is useful. Why do we protect such dangerous and useless creatures? Isn't one child's life more valuable than all the alligators there are? They not only kill our children, but they also kill our pets and other domestic animals. In a recent letter to the editor, a reader stated that "they were here before we were." Rattlesnakes were here before we were, too, but would anyone in his right mind hesitate to kill one, whether it was threatening someone or not?

EDGEWATER -- A 3-year-old child died Monday night from an accident on west Marion Avenue earlier that day, a Halifax Medical Center spokeswoman said. Hannah Lee Hughes was at a cabinet shop with relatives about 5 p.m. and ran up to her uncle's van as it pulled around the back, police said. The driver, John Miller, 35, of Edgewater, didn't see the child.

I was recently a guest in my daughter's home. She put out the clean towels, and she made the pancakes in the morning. Wait a second. How did this happen? When did Rebellious Teenager turn into Susie Homemaker? The recent weekend that started with a drive into the gated community with houses bigger than mine (is that allowed?) was the culmination of a strange journey that my daughter has been on for several years. I have been witness to this adventure and have enjoyed every exciting minute of it. It's called growing up, but there were days that I thought it would never happen.